“All Will Be Swept Away”

Wit Pietrzak is Professor of British and Irish Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Łódź, Poland. His main areas of interest are modernist and contemporary Anglophone poetry as well as theory and philosophy of literature. He has published The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats and numerous essays on contemporary British and Irish poetry.

• AcknowledgmentsList of abbreviationsIntroductionChapter 1. Shared worlds, shared voices: the work of empathy in elegies for family and friendsChapter 2. Vision and revision: paternal elegiesChapter 3. Poetry and politics in elegies for poets and literati Chapter 4. Mourning bare life: transnational elegiesChapter 5. Tradition of defiance: Lamentations Chapter 6. Between speech and silence: war elegiesWorks citedIndex

"This is more than just a book-length study of Muldoon's poetry, it is a book-length study of a poetry of sympathy, grief and death. Pietrzak makes a real contribution to studies of Muldoon's poetry of loss in the context of broader poetic and critical ideas about elegy as a political and psychoanalytical genre. Running throughout the book are close and fully theorised analyses of some of Muldoon's most challenging long poems, which will be invaluable both to the reader new to Muldoon and to longtime enthusiasts. This reader of American and English as well as Irish poetry will find in Pietrzak a critic who engages with the mercurial Muldoon in a style of seriousness, insight and wit."-Matthew Campbell, Professor of Modern Literature, University of York, UK.